Dad had been in a coma from the stroke for a few days at that point. All four siblings had arrived from their respective corners of Canada, and we were behaving as badly, as only the adult children of a police Sargent could.
I think my sister was 17 actually, so she won ‘teenager’ as her excuse for misbehaving. I was 19, the brothers would have been 22 and 24 when Dad went into his coma. We had been referring to it as the ‘karma coma’, which wasn’t super charitable. Dad wasn’t the easiest father though, so we had a history of extreme punishments, yelling and over-reactions, to justify our harshness.
The critical care ward waiting area at the hospital was what you’d expect. Hospital sterile, with some magazines and a tv playing something child friendly. So I brought Tim Burton’s, “The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy” and was reading it aloud to the people waiting for their turn to visit loved ones. We all started laughing, albeit it morbidly, but that was better than nothing. I had pull at the hospital, which was strange, as I was a film student. The head of the hospital was my best friends, ex-boyfriend’s Dad. His mom made it so that all four of us could see Dad at the same time instead of the usual single file coma visitation rules. The ability to see him like this for the first time together was huge.
I don’t know how I would have handled it had I not had my siblings there. As it was, the coma, the guilt from thinking he kind of deserved it, and the hoping desperately that our Dad wouldn’t die, kind of broke us. We went on a huge bender of inappropriate intoxication (which felt super necessary at the time), yelling at people who had wronged us in our younger years, speeding, and things best not mentioned. Needless to say, we were bad kids.
The badness came to the pinnacle when we were all in a car, speeding, likely should not have been driving at all, screaming out the window to music that I do not remember, but am certain, was terrible. We heard the police siren and uttered a collective, “Oh fuck.” When the policeman approached the window, he saw instantly how destroyed we were. It was fairly obvious. He asked us what we were doing. We looked at each other as though to say ‘what the hell *are* we doing’. The driving brother just said that our Dad was Sargent Caton. The policeman looked at us again, looked down on the ground, looked back up and told us that we needed to start behaving. He said that he was sorry about our Dad and we should go to our hotels now. He would be watching. We had somehow got a get out of jail free card (it’s worth noting we are super white and were we not, this would have gone very differently).
We behaved. Something clicked. We still had some drinks together, but well within the limits of sanity for our ages. We had come to terms with what was happening to our Dad and our family. It still sucked, but it was manageable.
Dad stayed in the coma for months, but eventually came out of it with some brain damage. His short term memory was shot, so he had to re-learn how to use email every day, and every day he sent me an email with an offensive dirty joke (not targeted at me – bad jokes were just Dad’s thing). They said he would never be able to move below the waist, but he was able to walk with a quad cane before he later was killed. He was stubborn and formidable. I miss him. These days, it’s hard to think of the bad things, and that’s a better place to be.